Carducci vs. Reynolds

Okay, not really, but here’s what one commenter at the A.V. Club (ostensibly commenting on a review of Reynolds’s Retromania) has to say:

I finally got a chance to read Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic and despised it. It was slightly interesting at times (it’s also outdated), but so meaninglessly politically reactionary it read like a Red State tract. It’s impossible to measure the bitterness that is contained within the pages: it’s not just ‘winding up the hippies’, it’s as pathetically phallocentric as a Norman Mailer journal entry. I understand why Reynolds would’ve found it intriguing, as it was definitely a uniquely individualistic look at rock music, but I also think he liked it because everything Carducci wrote was almost entirely the exact opposite of everything that Reynolds has ever written in his life… Reynolds is probably fifty times the writer that clowns like Joe Carducci are, more thoughtful and more intelligent. Maybe I’m biased because I remember fondly reading him, and a handful of other terrific writers, in the last heyday of the Melody Maker, but to even put him in the same hemisphere as some middle-aged crank who thought that fucking Saccharine Trust was the second coming is an insult to just about anybody who has ever uttered a word.